We received a letter from a lawyer represeting the CRIA, they were threatening with legal action and We need to start blocking Canadian traffic because of this. If you reside in Canada, that is the reason you are being redirected to this message. Thanks for your understanding, and sorry for any inconvenience.

The site is still available from the Philippines. It's clearly one of those sites offering illegal content.

"This is a collection of stock photography from iStockphoto.com. There's 46 photos in this torrent, which works out at $186 of stock photography, which I managed to steal.

All the pictures are of dudes, there's no pornography here, it's just dudes, k?They're all pretty big pictures, and they make great wallpapers (they're all around 1650x1150 landcape, 1150x1650 portrait)."

Around February 2007, somebody posted a video to YouTube to show how to use a security hole to steal pictures without the watermark. He was saying that he knew this hole since 8 months. IS banned him and fixed the hole. Maybe these pics were stolen back then. Or, at least, it perfectly demonstrates that our pictures can be "stolen".

Anyone a member of YouTube and can post a comment to that video saying, in the politest of terms, that the author of the video is a thief? It might be useful to have a few comments to balance the 'Wow this is cool' comments that are already there.

If the author of this video is telling the truth, then he informed istockphoto of this hole months in advance of his posting the video. I certainly don't approve of him posting the video, but it certainly kicked IS into gear to fix a known bug. In perspective, I would be more upset at IS for this then the messenger.

Or, at least, it perfectly demonstrates that our pictures can be "stolen".

They possibly can, but it must not be an easy task, if it meant cracking the site.

However, in TotallyPhotos, when members were allowed to act like inspectors, I raised the discussion that none of us had signed any sort of confidentiality agreement, yet anyone was able to download a full res version of any unreviewed image.

So imagine you are an inspector at IS and you like to collect a certain type of image, even if just for browsing in your PC, and then your brother copies all those files and give them to friends?

Or, at least, it perfectly demonstrates that our pictures can be "stolen".

They possibly can, but it must not be an easy task, if it meant cracking the site.

It's doesn't really look like he cracked the site. The youtube video seems to show a simple technique of using the zoom in feature to extract the full file without the watermark. Process: zoom into each portion of the file take a screen shot, zoom all the way back out, then zoom in again only a little to the side. This allows you to get full rez of the image without the water mark by editing the photo together using the portions of the screenshots that didn't contain the watermark. All he did was create a program to automatically do this. I've always thought this would be possible so I've never liked that iStock (and a bunch of other sites) allowed zoom in.